APPROACHES TO POETRY

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. One advantage of writing poetry within a rich and crowded literary tradition is that there are many poetic tools available out there, stranded where their last practitioners dropped them, some of them perhaps clichéd and overused, yet others all but forgotten or ignored. In this class, students will isolate, describe, analyze, and put to use these many tools, while attempting to refurbish and contemporize them for the new century. Students can expect to imitate and/or subvert various poetic styles, voices, and forms, to invent their own poetic forms and rules, to think in terms of not only specific poetic forms and metrics, but of overall poetic architecture (lineation and diction, repetition and surprise, irony and sincerity, rhyme and soundscape), and finally, to leave those traditions behind and learn to strike out in their own direction, to write -- as poet Frank OHara said -- on their own nerve.